HIPKISS

Vernissage: 29 February and 1 March 2020 from 11 am to 5 pm. Exhibition on the occasion of the weekend ArtCarouge, collective openings of 8 galleries and 1 museum in Carouge.

Hipkiss is the collective pseudonym of Alpha and Christopher Mason (both born in 1964), who have been working together since their meeting in London in the early 1980s, when both were leading small animal rights' groups. British by birth, they have lived in France since 2001 and consider themselves Anglo-French.

Fascinated by the geographical meeting of the urban and rural, the couple have lived in small villages or countryside since the early 1990s while drawing inspiration from cities and hinterlands. They have been keen ornithologists since childhood, and a connection with birdlife is evident from the earliest stages of Hipkiss' career. Botany and entomology, and the work of some of the early illustrators and photographers within these fields – for example Anne Atkins, Robert Hooke, Elizabeth Blackwell, Maria Merian and Karl Blossfeldt – are long-standing interests that have more recently become overt within the artists' practice.

For the first two decades of their career, Hipkiss were known for detailed and often panoramic landscapes, rendered in graphite over silver ink on heavy paper. Ever faithful to these media, more recently they have added various metals and some elements of colour and expanded their compositional palette. The various tower formats featured in this show developed by chance from a design collaboration with Limoges porcelain artisans, Animal Fabuleux. Within the circular elements, human-animal figures evolved, using predominately plant and insect motifs from the artists' environment.

Hipkiss have said that the towers offer a feeling of space, between and beyond the circles that form them, and a liberation from conventional compositions; it also allows them to make immense, modulable landscapes which nonetheless retain a sense of expansiveness for the viewer. From the original seven-circle Imagoes – chakra portraits, as the artists describe them – have come smaller incarnations, incorporating fewer circles: Instars, Larvae, Capitules, Stigmas and Ova.

Parts of the artists' ongoing project, Pit Land Against Sea (2015—), were first shown in a solo show – entitled Bulwark – at The Drawing Center, New York, in 2018. Les Yeux s'Ouvrent is Hipkiss' first solo exhibition in Switzerland and showcases all forms of the towers. The project title, Pit Land Against Sea, refers to opposition and conflict between two elements, both of which are fundamental and unavoidable, within a confined arena: politics and social politics – especially relating to gender; competing belief systems; climate and biodiversity imperatives versus capitalism.

The project embodies a mature phase of the practice and concepts that have long driven the artists' work; what defines it in its motivations is a newfound awareness of the need to understand the other as well as the self. Tellingly, hitherto, the works of Pit Land Against Sea have centred around the 'Land' side, the 'other' represented by mere whispers in the detail. In 2020, they finally feel ready to dive into the 'Sea', largely thanks to research funding from the DRAC Occitanie. Several of the drawings on display at Le Salon Vert betray a hint of this direction.

Hipkiss is represented in the collections of FRAC Picardie, FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, John Michael Kohler Art Center, The Kupferstichkabinett, The Whitworth, Cindy Sherman, Rudolf Zwirner and Antoine de Galbert, among others. Their work has been shown at Tate Britain, Whitechapel, David Zwirner, The Drawing Center, La Maison Rouge, New Museum, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, La Caixa and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. The duo lives and works in rural SW France.

The creation of this show was supported in part by the DRAC Occitanie.